Sucker Punch (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter 27)

“Even when they cry for help and beg you not to kill them?” he asked, and his eyes filled with the horror of it.

We did not have time for this, but in a way, we didn’t have time to ignore it. I finally realized that Newman had asked me here to save more than just Bobby. Damn it. “Those are bad,” I said finally.

“Monsters aren’t supposed to beg for their lives and say they’re sorry,” he said, his face still holding the horror of that moment when he began to question if he was the monster. I remembered my moment. Hell, I was still having them.

“Everything wants to live, Newman, even monsters.”

He looked at me, frowning, and the bad memories in his eyes began to fade, replaced by that dogged determination to learn, to get better, to listen, that was one of his best qualities as a marshal.

“I’ve had a vampire beg me not to kill her while she was covered in the blood of her victims. It wasn’t her fault. Her master made her do it,” I said.

“Was it true? Did her master make her do it?”

“Maybe, or maybe vampires are just like any criminal. It’s never their fault. You were a regular cop for a couple of years. Did you ever arrest someone who believed they were guilty and deserved the punishment?”

He thought about it, then shook his head. “No, either they didn’t do it, or it wasn’t their fault. They’d blame the victim. If she had given me her purse, I wouldn’t have had to hit her. If my husband hadn’t cheated on me, I wouldn’t have stabbed him. Or my favorite: the man who kept saying, ‘I hit her before, and she never died.’ He just kept saying that as if it was a defense of some kind. It was like he really believed that she’d died out of spite, just to put him in jail. He slammed her head into the edge of a metal table until her brains leaked out the front of her skull, but it wasn’t his fault that the bitch died.” Newman was angry as he said the last, righteously angry at the everyday evil of it.

“Now, think what that abusive shit would have said if you could have legally aimed a gun and killed him there and then.”

I watched the anger deepen as he said, “He’d have said, ‘Why you killing me? What’d I do? It’s not my fault the bitch died.’”

“Turning into vampires or werewolves or whatever doesn’t stop them from being the people they were before. If they were evil and petty before, they’re still evil and petty afterward.”

“What about the nice model citizens that turn evil after they become vampires?” he asked.

“You know that old saying ‘power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’?”

“Yes,” he said.

“I think a lot of people are only nice because they don’t think they have a choice. Give them supernatural powers, the ability to control people with just their gaze, and they don’t have to play nice anymore. They can take what they want, so they do. Of course, all that is predicated on them being undead long enough to regain their minds. The newly risen aren’t deep thinkers.”

“New vampires are like rabid animals. They kill everything they find,” Newman said, and again there was that haunted look in his eyes.

“Yeah, the newly undead need a master to control them. There are rules in place that if you turn someone into a vampire, you have to stay with them until they gain enough control to function safely. If you abandon them, the other masters will hunt you down and make sure you don’t do it again, or they did in the old days before law enforcement was supposed to do it for them.”

“Sometimes I wish it was the old days,” he said, voice low.

“Sometimes me, too,” I said.

“Really?” he asked.

I nodded.

“You wouldn’t be marrying Jean-Claude if it was the old days,” he said.

“There is that,” I said, and smiled, thinking about my tall, pale, and gorgeous fiancé.

Newman smiled back at me, which meant maybe I could stop hand-holding and get us back to business.

“Do you still do morgue stakings?” he asked.

“No, vampires chained down, dead to the world, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. I leave the easy kills to the new marshals.”

“It’s not easy when it’s nightfall and they’re begging for their lives.”

I counted to ten, because I went right back to being angry. It was my go-to emotion and had been since my mother died or maybe even before. I just couldn’t remember me that clearly before my mother’s death. I was only eight when it happened.

“Refuse the morgue stakings and tell any new marshals that they don’t have to agree to nighttime morgue kills.”